Meeting Miss Mystic (29 page)

It’s me.
In Holly’s voice. He’d heard it dozens of times.

“H-Holly?”

He started breathing faster, his mind working wildly to try to figure out what was going on.

He pulled the phone away from his ear to look at the Caller ID: MtnViewInn. His heart wasn’t calming down and his brain muddled with confusion.

“No. It’s, um, it’s Zoë.”

“Zoë?” he asked, trying to take a deep breath, but unable. Zoë had answered the phone
It’s me
, in Holly’s voice. He’d bet his life on it.

“Yeah. Zoë,” she said firmly, her voice lower and breathier than it had been a moment ago. “Is everything okay?”

“Y-yeah,” he mumbled.

There was a long silence between them before she offered in a nervous voice, “Thanks for last night. It was great.”

He tried to concentrate on what she was saying, but he couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. The call was definitely coming from the Mountain View Inn, the voice he’d originally heard pick up the phone was Holly’s, but now it sounded like Zoë. Was this his mind playing tricks on him? Was he going crazy from a mixture of lust and guilt?

“Zoë.”

“It’s me. I’m here…”

“I just wanted to say…I mean, I wanted to ask you—”

“Paul, Nils just pulled up. I have to go. Can we talk when I get back?”

“Do you have a cell number?”

There was a long pause. Too long.

“I don’t, um…my cell isn’t working here.”

“Okay.” He grimaced and his chest tightened as unfamiliar tears of confusion popped into his eyes, surprising him, burning painfully. Her phone had been working fine three days ago as they drove into Yellowstone with Lars and Jane.

“Paul…I’m…I’m crazy about you. I need you to know that. It’s important to me that you know it. Really know it. Don’t forget, okay?”

His eyes clenched shut painfully and he braced his hands on the kitchen counter. They were the exact same words Holly had used two weeks ago when she told him she was falling for him.

“Hol—Zoë…”

“I have to go,” she said, and it came out a little bit like a sob. “I’ll see you Thursday.”

The line went dead.

He held the phone up to his ear long after the call had disconnected. He absently placed the phone on the counter, his mind reeling. The uneasiness in his stomach made him feel nauseous and he grimaced, swallowing back the cereal and coffee that threatened a reappearance.

He stared out the window, frantically trying to make sense of what had just happened. Zoë’s last name was Flannigan, not Fine, not Morgan? And her voice sounded identical to Holly’s over the phone. Could Zoë be a cousin of Holly’s? No. Holly didn’t have a cousin yet. Her aunt was pregnant with her first child.

Was there any chance his guilt about breaking up with Holly was overriding rational thought? Was his mind playing tricks on him? He might be able to believe that if it was just the familiarity of Holly’s voice when he picked up the phone, but her last name? The words
It’s me…really know it, don’t forget.
It was too much of a coincidence. That was Holly on the phone. He was sure of it.

He picked up the phone and hit the caller ID button again to be sure of the number he’d just called. MtnViewInn. There’s no doubt that he called the Mountain View Inn. The voice was definitely Holly’s, even though she
said
she was Zoë.

What the fuck is going on?

Hearing the roar of a van engine outside, he realized she wasn’t gone yet and he sprinted out of his house just in time to see the Lindstrom & Sons van turn right off his road, headed toward the Roosevelt Arch. He stood under his porch watching as the van kicked up dust, headed for the park.

“Shit!”

Zoë or Holly, or whoever the hell she was, was gone.

Suddenly he heard her words in his head,
What if Holly was here? What if you could have both of us? What if you didn’t have to choose?

His eyes fluttered closed and he lowered his body raggedly to sit down on the top step of his porch as her words came rushing back to him—puzzle pieces, jagged and anonymous on their own, fitting together with heartbreaking precision. It was all there. All of it. He’d just been too much of a blind idiot to put it all together.

Oh, my God.

There was only one explanation and it greeted him like a hit to the chest, shattering the bones of his ribs into shards that staked his gasping heart.

Oh, my God. Zoë is Holly. Holly is Zoë.

Zoë was an artist and Holly was an art teacher. Zoë’s bags were left in Rhode Island and Holly lived in Connecticut. And Zoë was here in Gardiner…to see a man, a man shrouded in confusion and uncertainty every time Zoë mentioned him. Paul had held her, reassuring her, telling her that the guy was an idiot if he didn’t see how great she was. But she had answered that she didn’t know if it would work out,
He’s my whole world, but I haven’t been honest with him.

Well, that was a fucking understatement. The whole thing had been a lie.

It suddenly occurred to him that Holly probably didn’t even exist. The blue-eyed blonde schoolteacher with a sunny smile was really an edgy, brown-eyed, dark-haired woman who built websites and had endless amounts of sorrow etched—literally—into her face. Had she just used the persona “Holly” to lure him into her world? That picture had probably been scanned from a magazine or copied off the internet. Holly and Zoë looked
nothing
alike.

He stood up and sprinted up the stairs, throwing open the front door and not stopping until he sat on the edge of his bed. He took out the framed picture that Zoë had been looking at last night and stared at it. Hard. The woman in the picture had long, blonde wavy hair, but it was impossible to tell her eye color behind the sunglasses. The skin of her face was tan and flawless and her body was much trimmer than Zoë’s with long, perfect legs. They didn’t look a thing alike. Except for the smile. He stared at it hard, thinking about Zoë smiling at him in the candlelight from across the table last night, and realized in horror that it was the same smile.

He threw the frame across the room angrily and didn’t look up as the glass shattered against his wall, small pieces bouncing from the wall to the carpet below.

A terrible thought suddenly occurred to him, and his face contorted.

Had it all been a game to her? Was this something she did? Meet men over the internet and pretend to be one person only to show up later to reveal herself as someone totally different?

His eyes burned and he covered them with his hands, bowing his head in frustration and anger and confusion and a growing, aching sadness.

He needed answers and he needed them now. Even if Holly’s phone number worked on Zoë’s phone, she wouldn’t have a signal by now, and anyway, she was a big liar. It would take a face-to-face conversation to try to unravel Zoë/Holly’s thick and tawdry web of lies. No. Screw the liar. He’d get his answers somewhere else.

From someone he actually trusted.

Something had happened between Zoë and Maggie when they met for the first time on Saturday night, he was sure of it. There was only one other person in Gardiner who might have some answers, and he wasn’t going to work until he got some.

***

“Maggie! I need to talk to you!” he strode into the café with purpose, his heart racing from the exertion of the fast walk. His eyes narrowed with challenge, and, more and more, with despair and deep embarrassment…and fury.

Maggie’s green eyes widened into saucers and she leaned back from the bar where she was chatting with Miss Phillips, of shingles fame. Paul didn’t even nod to the older woman. He stood by the bar, hands on his hips, fuming, eyes locked with Maggie’s.

Maggie took a deep breath, staring at his eyes, then looking away uncomfortably and swallowed as she took a step toward him.

Oh, she knew something, all right.

“She told you,” she said softly.

“
She told me what
?” he bellowed, gaining the attention of every newspaper-reading, coffee-drinking patron in the Prairie Dawn, who stared at the generally good-natured high school principal with wide eyes and mouths dropped open.

His yelling seemed to spur Maggie into action and her brow furrowed as she walked out from behind the bar, took hold of his sleeve and pulled him back out the front door. He had no choice but to follow behind her. She held onto his arm as they walked around behind the café toward the river, not stopping until they reached a beat-up picnic table by the water that had seen a few too many winters. She maneuvered herself to sit down on the bench, folded her hands in front of her and looked up at Paul.

He was too angry to sit. “What the
fuck
, Maggie?”

“You’re
not
goin’ to be usin’ that language with me, Paul Johansson. No matter how angry you are, you’ll be tonin’ it down.” She held his eyes until he looked away. “Now start over or we’re done here.”

“Am I losing my goddamned mind or is Holly actually Zoë?”

Maggie took a long, deep breath through her nose then nodded. “Aye. Holly and Zoë are the same person.”

He placed a palm on his chest as his heart galloped painfully and his breathing hitched uncomfortably, making him ache.

“When—how did you find out?” she asked.

“I called her inn this morning and found out her last name is Flannigan. She forgot to disguise her voice and I recognized it. She must have forgotten to ‘be’ Zoë for a minute. Little. Fucking. Liar.”

“I’m warnin’ you about the language.”

He wished he could calm the fierce thumping of his heart which reverberated in his ears, making his head pound. He nodded once in acknowledgement of her words before continuing.

“We had dinner last night. Me and Zoë. It was amazing. I told her I was breaking up with Holly and she said—she said…‘What if Holly was here? What if you didn’t have to choose? What if you could have both of us?’ It wasn’t sitting right with me so I wanted to call her before she left for the park this morning, and…and…”

His voice was practically a whisper as he sank down on the edge of the table beside Maggie, his anger losing momentum as he felt his heart breaking. He was the stupidest, blindest man who ever walked the earth. How could he not have seen it? How could he have been such an idiot?

“Zoë’s Holly,” Maggie murmured. “She came here to tell you.”

Maggie’s words poured heat and anger back into his blood and he almost sighed with relief, grateful for a distraction from the crushing sorrow.

“Tell me
what
? That everything between us is a big, fat fucking lie? I mean, do I even know who the
fuck
she is?”

“That’s it.” Maggie slapped her hands on the picnic table and got up like she was leaving. Paul grabbed her wrist.

“Wait. Stop. Please.” He looked up at his friend and knew she had to see it in his eyes by the way hers softened. She had to see that the ground was shifting madly under his feet and the world he’d been living in was crumbling around him. She could see. She knew. She sat back down slowly, giving him a warning look.

“No more f-bombs, Paul. I mean it, now.”

“Sorry. I won’t curse like that, Maggie. I’m sorry. I’m a mess. I’m trying to understand what the f—hell is going on here.”

“She’s just—”

“She’s just a goddamned liar. Jesus, Maggie, I don’t even know what’s real and what’s not real!”

“I don’t think that’s true at all. You’re upset and you’re overreacti—”

“Oh, am I
overreacting
? Am I? Because it seems like the woman I have fallen in love with—
twice
now—has been lying to me since day one.”

“You need to listen to what you’re sayin—”

“How did
you
know? How did you know and I didn’t know? Am I that much of an idiot? That blind? Was she laughing at me the whole time?”

“I saw the original picture on the website before she took it down. She looks very different now, but I figured it out. And no, Paul. She wasn’t laughin’. Never once. Not at all. She’s been a wreck since she arrived, tryin’ to figure out how to tell you, how to make it right.”

“Are you sure? ‘Cause this is a pretty good joke on me. She poses as a hot, put-together blonde and then shows up later as an edgy, tattooed—”

“Be careful what you say. I can’t un-hear your words.”

“I mean, is this how she gets her kicks? Duping guys into thinking she’s one thing, then—”

“
Enough
.” Maggie’s tone was harsh and final. “Enough. I don’t even know who
you
are right now. She made some mistakes. She liked you too much to come clean. For God’s sake, she didn’t
kill
anyone.”

Paul’s eyes widened at Maggie’s tone and he swallowed, clenching his jaw painfully.

“She killed my heart,” he whispered, staring, crestfallen, at his friend. “I don’t understand.”

“Will you let me talk? Let me
help
you understand.” Her voice had softened and she cocked her head to the side, her eyes compassionate and gentle. “Take a deep breath. Now another. I need you to calm down and then we’ll talk about it all.”

Paul swallowed the gigantic lump in his throat, taking two deep breaths. He glanced at his watch. “I have to call school and tell them I’m running late.”

He took his phone out of his back pocket and moved away from Maggie, dialing the number of the school secretary. In seven years, he’d never missed a day of school and now he was deliberately going late to sort out his train wreck of a love life. He took another deep breath, explained to the secretary that he’d be about an hour late and then hung up. Turning to Maggie, he came and sat across from her at the table.

“Okay. I’ll shut up. Please tell me what’s going on?”

Maggie held his eyes for a moment before nodding.

“The picture? The girl in the white sundress? That’s her. The same girl that’s here in Gardiner now. Zoë. Zoë Holly Flannigan. It was taken two years ago at her aunt’s weddin’ by her sister. Two years ago, when she was sunny and bright, when she was a schoolteacher with her whole life ahead of her, and she placed an ad on MeettheOne.com one night with a girlfriend. A week or two later, she was in a car accident and it changed her life.